100 years ago, a man wrote passionately about the incompetency that led to a terrible tragedy. The freshness of his words struck me when I first discovered them in 2001. Today, on the 100th anniversary of that tragedy – the sinking of the Titanic, I thought the words of that man – Thomas Fleming Day – were worth repeating. The Open Library makes it possible to do so. When I read this 1912 article in 2012, many questions come to mind. How are we designing today? How do we communicate simple safety procedures? How do we conduct training? How do we shoulder responsibility at all stages of a project? (As an uncomfortable parallel, read D.A. Winsor’s IEEE PCS article from 1988 called “Communication Failures Contributing to the Challenger Accident: An Example for Technical Communicators” (link opens PDF).) We are supposed to learn from past failures. Is that happening, or do…
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A WordPress weekend should be covered on a WordPress blog! I spent the past weekend “geeking out” with WordPress. Once again, the online experience led to great real life get-togethers and discussions. I share tips, links, and photos in this post. You should try a WordPress get-together in your neighborhood to get the feeling of energy that I experienced. Here’s my report on two days with WordPress – first with the wordpress.dk group and then with the Geek Girls Meetup CPH group. Saturday – WordPress.dk Meetup Saturday was a gathering of the usual WordPress suspects from the WordPress.dk community in Copenhagen, thanks to Mark Gazel. Oodles of Plugins First up: Thomas Clausen, who walked us through a list of what he considers to be great and useful plugins. (I drooled because he did his presentation from his iPad.) I confess that I didn’t get all the details about each plugin.…
6 CommentsI feel so overwhelmed when I encounter websites that use the phrase “Read more” or “Click here”. The overwhelming feeling comes from realizing how many people need to get rid of this bad habit. It’s the wrong thing to do. This bad practice is so ubiquitous that most people probably concludes that it is OK. But it isn’t! My latest encounter was on the website for the museum of Copenhagen. The Danish version of the site is the same. Imagine that you had a list of only the links from a web page. I mean a list of the phrases displayed with a link, not the actual hyperlink. The list on a site that uses “Read more” would be as follows: Read more Read more Read more Read more I could continue. It’s meaningless, right? That is what anyone who reads a website with a screen reader encounters. Screen readers…
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